Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate(utkusen.substack.com) |
Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate(utkusen.substack.com) |
Now, if the critique here is that Mr. Free Speech is rolling over and showing his belly to the first autocrat who shows up at his door, yeah, I get that, but it’s a little bit more of a “dog bites man” than a “man bites dog” story at this point.
I didn't participate in the protests, but I did manage to wander into the wrong place at the wrong time and got teargassed pretty good and hard. I sheltered from the gas and the water cannons and the soldiers with a group of protestors overnight and got to learn from them firsthand.
They were using Twitter extensively to coordinate and to find out what what was going on because state media was completely bogus. They told me the government was blocking or throttling network traffic from Twitter at the DNS and ISP level to suppress the uprising.
Twitter routinely refused or challenged Turkish government demands to take down material or to turn over logs. I remember that in 2014 the government demanded Twitter take down links to evidence of official corruption and Twitter refused.
Pre-Musk Twitter quite vigorously fought Turkish demands for censorship. Not every time, but many times.
After Musk took over, Twitter/X has been far more compliant with Turkish takedown demands. Before Turkish elections in 2023, Twitter restricted access to some accounts in Turkey to avoid threats of a wider shutdown. Musk publicly defended his decision as the "lesser of two evils".
X’s own figures (as cited by Human Rights Watch) show 86% compliance with government requests from Turkey in 2024 (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/08/joint-open-letter-social...).
Compare that to pre-Musk times, where Twitter complied with Turkish court orders ~25% of the time (https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/313615_TURK...).
Free-speech Twitter no longer exists.
I don’t think this is an accurate read. From the outside you don’t really know what they fought or didn’t fight, and why. It is possible Twitter/X chose not to fight certain situations based on prior experience or precedent. But in other cases, post-Musk, they have fought government censorship. For example they continued fighting the government of India even a year after Musk acquired Twitter/X. And they also had a showdown with Brazil’s government, where it was pretty blatantly violating Brazil’s own constitution.
This is ironic on a posting discussing shadow bans.
Care to share the sources that Elon fought those countries? Because the Wikipedia list of Twitter censorship shows that X complied with the majority requests from those countries.
It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff.
Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.
New Twitter is worse, but the Twitter of the past had no real spine either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Ara...
Twitter's strict "fun wins" algorithm of past seem like it had been a major driver in e.g. Arab Spring.
I have no idea how people could delude themselves into thinking that was a better situation, especially during a Trump presidency that has been deporting and excluding people for speech, but it's impossible to understand the movement Democrat's value system at any particular moment.
It's of course sad that we have to rely on Mr. Free Speech Oligarch in order to debate subjects from positions that consistently poll majorities of the electorate, but I'd rely on China, Russia and Iran to talk about my problems with the US government, too. They openly hate free speech, they just support the freedom of that sort of speech (until the US likes them again.) It's the US that is desperate to abandon what is almost literally its Prime Directive and main differentiator from the rest of the world. We are popularly sovereign. We are not ruled by God through His current anointed representative bloodline, with a Parliament as a customary intermediary (which is actually a frozen conflict.)
How many years are we away from a POTUS directly passing rule to their child or spouse? We've gotten awfully close multiple times in the past couple decades. Will Democrats finally be happy that dumb people don't get to vote anymore? Do we pass from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire again, propelled by the righteous complaints of slaves and farmers about a decadent, narcissistic, do-nothing elite?
Not just at this point, and not just Twitter - slanting algorithms and bans for political ends is common practice, it's just usually a little more subtle:
Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign - https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/twitter-milita...
On Facebook, Comments About ‘Whites,’ ‘Men,’ And ‘Americans’ Will Face Less Moderation - https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/12/03/on-face...
Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts - https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-...
Emi Palmor, the former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice is on Facebook's oversight board - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emi_Palmor
1993-1997 US secretary of Labor Robert Reich: Trump is suing Facebook, Twitter, and Google for violating his 1st Amendment rights by keeping him off their platforms. Someone should remind him that they're private companies to which the 1st Amendment doesn't apply. - https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1412826396490039296
Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook’s Content Policy - https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-fa...
Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages - https://apnews.com/article/7ea31c13b8bf45db88430e763e594025
Polish PM calls Facebook ban on far-right party undemocratic - https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-h...
YouTube: Keeping Americans in the Dark on Islam - https://www.raymondibrahim.com/01/26/2018/youtube-keeping-am...
PPC candidate banned from Facebook and public debates - https://xcancel.com/MarcScottEmery/status/143384506948066510...
Website critical of Joe Biden banned by reddit, and even banned from private messages on Facebook - https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/hr30p3/reddit_f...
Facebook Prevents Sharing New York Post Story on Black Lives Matter Founder Patrisse Cullors' Real Estate - https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-prevents-sharing-new-york-...
Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele...
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News - https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
Reporter: Facebook using ex-CIA to decide misinformation policy is ‘very, very worrying’ - https://thehill.com/hilltv/3566225-reporter-facebook-using-e...
Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...
How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
Which other billionaire media moguls are neutral actors? Rupert Murdoch? Ted Turner? Jeff Bezos?
None of them are, because the value of media is based on its ability to control public opinion and influence elections. Otherwise none of the guys I mentioned at the top would be in that business.
"If you don't follow media you're uninformed, if you do you're misinformed."
Also the EU is not exactly innocent or a better authority - see the interference recently in Romania’s elections, where they literally annulled the votes cast by citizens, banned a candidate, and reran the elections so they would get the desired result.
Irrespective of how Musk's overall social media posturing portrays "free speech" -- X is the only one whose speech matters and they are apparently choosing to 'speak' in ways that don't support him. They are technically doing this guy a favor by letting him post on their site in the first place, and in an algorithmic timeline it is impossible to justify how much reach his posts "should" have vs. how much they do have.
If someone wants to post their speech, they should do so on their own website that they pay for and control. They should purchase advertising if they're not satisfied with their traffic. Thwarting those things -- now that's unethical government censorship, which one can justifiably be mad about. Depending on the government in question it may or may not be unconstitutional.
Relying on X or Meta or whomever to distribute your speech just because there's some vague notion of non-interference in speech on such platforms in the countries where they're based is foolish when you live somewhere else with different laws. Even if the US constitution had some draconian provision to force X to promote his speech, that can't really protect him in Turkiye where the government can just block X.
think on this
Regardless of the origin, I’d prefer if the comment make an actual claim, instead of just talking about “questions raised”. I wish they’d try to answer the question they detect lol
These shadowban stories are so often just hearsay and anecdotes from random users just feeding weird conspiracy vibes. Never go on a user saying they don't see something, there's too many variables in the mix from their usage patterns to sure, actual weird Elon/X algorithm tweaks at play.
From the last paragraph:
"We don’t have solid proof, but it strongly suggests that X is secretly shadow banning İmamoğlu. I don’t think Elon Musk will change this, but I’m writing this article to show the political power he holds."
Also, most of the accounts tweets only have around 200k impressions, which is much lower than what the old x account(which was banned by the government) used to get.
Also another point, erdogans government is so intolerant of seeing the presidential candidate is that they've literally took down banners and posters that mention anything about him. It is "illegal" to have a banner ad that has the text "Ekrem İmamoğlu" or a photo showing İmamoğlu. Do you really think a government that goes to such extremes won't try and persuade Twitter to shadowban the presidential candidate's x account?
There can be an element of force to how they win but it is not the whole picture.
Have to accept that there are a lot of people with reasons to support these politicians
However, Twitter wasn't instrumental in getting Erdogan elected in 2003.
TV/Radio has been his thing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13746679
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/30/turkey-closes-...
I like how Elon is so eager to bend his knee to censor requests from authoritarian "friend" governments like India and Turkey
but when the request comes from a supposedly "left-leaning" judiciary like Brazil to suspend accounts that were posting misinformation, suddenly he stands on his principles and defy the orders.
This is a nothing burger.
Shadow-banning opposition voices is a gift to governments that fear open debate, and Musk is complicit.
Free speech isn’t free if it only applies where it’s convenient.
Man, this is true across so much of the political landscape.
"Principles" are what we enforce on others and excuse away for ourselves.
It's the same reason libel and defamation laws exist: someone realized that countries operate better when spreading falsehoods to tarnish a party is illegal, and so laws exist to influence public discourse.
- As a customer of an ad network or media property or whatever, you either get what you pay for and are happy, or you can go to another one. I totally expect there are arbitrary restrictions imposed by some. But advertising is more of a commodity. And I don't mean to suggest online ads are the only choice.
Article points out that this politician has actually been banned from billboards (which is literally censorship) but I just don't see "Internet" as automatically fixing things like that. Yes, governments can ban people for ridiculous reasons. We were naïve to ever believe that "Internet" would be a trump card for any such nefarious government activity. We live in nations. Nations have power. In some cases people have legitimately chosen a leader whose value system runs counter to our ideals, but that's still democracy working as intended. In other cases, despots take that power in unfair ways. In either case though, "Internet," and especially private social media sites, are not a serious "solution" to anything. The sooner people understand that the better off we'll be.
Internet companies (like all companies) can and indeed must choose how they behave. "We follow all laws inside each country" is one such choice, but it's not a special privileged choice that absolves the company of criticism for its behavior.
They took a pretty good stab at it in 1948: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
To be honest, you could restrict your compliance to only the laws of the country you're based in. American companies follow American laws, etc. Then move your company to where you most agree with the laws.
Social media companies aren't gonna take a foreign government to court to arbitrate requests in order to protect a citizen since the law is always on the side of the government as they're the ones making it and enforcing it.
The EU and EU members also tell X to ban certain political topics they dislike under various pretexts, and X always complies without question. Like I was sending a friend from Germany a clip on X of Ukrainian recruiters kidnapping a guy off the street and throwing him in a van but surprise, my friend couldn't watch it as the video was banned in Germany but not in my EU country. What German law was it breaking? I don't know, it didn't say, but it doesn't really matter since any government makes up the speech rules as they go and uses selective enforcement on the basis of "for my friends anything, for my enemies the law" so every government practices its own version of domestic censorship in order to maintain its power.
Edit: Note the parent has since been edited and previously said the tell was an “em-dash”, but now says “long dashes” in reference to a single correct use of the shortest—except in fonts with narrow digits, where the figure dash might be shorter—dash.
Can you clarify where in the Twitter Files it says that things were run by “legal and moral busybodies”? From what I recall the “Twitter Files” were just big dumps of innocuous records that rarely (if ever) contained any sort of narrative. The “story” of what they meant was entirely constructed by folks that pretty transparently set out with the intention of making Musk look good (eg Matt Taibbi)
Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.
;)
If you don't like X (understandable) then it's much better to not visit it voluntarily than by a top-down block
Yep. In 2013 the social networks all found out that they can sell censorship to governments all over the world and their users wouldn't even notice it.
Free-speech Twitter was either an accident or had a very quick change of mind. And either way, expecting centralized platforms to be of any use here is deeply misguided.
Anyway, that doesn't matter, what matters is that the people that are still using platforms are effectively collaborating with totalitarian extremists and should be shunned.
True. For better, but mostly for worse.
>In 2013, the authoritarianism was not on the rise
Just because you didn't see it, doesn't mean authoritarian wasn't on the rise. By the time you see it it's already too late.
>Most western democracies succumbed to levels of authoritarianism.
Because they discovered how powerful and important social media is, so they're seeking to control it more than they did in 2013 because leaders in 2013 didn't fully understand the internet.
And because most western democracies aren't true democracies where people have a voice in all matters that affect them, but function on the basis of controlled opposition, where there's two maximum three major parties pretending to oppose each other but all of which are coopted by the big-money establishment, making your vote irrelevant as no matter who you vote for, housing will still keep being more expensive, etc. even though you voted for the opposite thing to happen.
And if you vote for a fringe party or candidate that's not part of the establishment, and that candidate ends up getting enough traction to alter the elections, then that candidate will be eliminated from elections using selective enforcement of the law: see France, Romania, Germany, etc. Democrats tried to to the same to Trump to get him out of the 2024 presidential race with his mugshot everywhere, but failed. Not that Trump is not part of the establishment though.
No distribution going on the mainstream social networks today is unchecked.
(Except for Watsup, Signal, and the ones like them.)
"""
The European Commission offered an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.
The other platforms accepted that deal.
X did not.
"""
-- sent from the front seat of my FSD-based unmanned Robotaxi
I know 2024 was like a century ago though so its ok to have already forgotten! It's probably more notable event for Bluesky than Twitter at this point either way. But also either way: there is a clear contrast here with the OP article.
Either you are going out of your way to unban guys, or going out of your way to (effectively) ban them. I think its uncontroversial at the very least to note that he does seem to be making it incredibly hard to argue against the evidence of ideological commitment here, even if there are some 3D chess players out there who can maybe still see a "free speech" forest through the political trees.
> civil war is inevitable
as the owner of a key media platform in the world that sort of statement is indefensible.
He's also picked a side in Germany by weighing in with as much support as possible for AfD.
Don't pick this as a hill to die on, that man isn't worth it.
He tried to bribe one party to accept an extremist as a member in return for a huge bribe, and he failed.
He does not seem to have much influence on public opinion.
I do not think its accurate to say he was fighting countries either. He was trying to buy influence. Its not the same thing.
As an example: there is significant power in cultivating the default UK experience of twitter for new accounts, which he's already had significant impact on by culling Twitter's internal moderation team. I've experienced it myself and its a an absolute disaster zone of disinformation and bot accounts trying to stoke internal divisions.
What are you talking about? Are you making up strawmen?
Elon Musk has made his political intentions entirely clear, in writing, on his personal account. Anyone still trying to give him the benefit of the doubt is either being insincere or is a useful idiot.
Also, shouldn't you be more concerned with little girls in the UK needing to carry knives and axes to defend themselves from migrant rape gangs, than with what Elon is saying?
Especially since he's not causing those issues, he's just reading the room and calling it out as it is.
I feel like you're getting worked up for the wrong things.
Yes, its a different issue from what influence he has personally.
Well thanks for letting me know where you get your information from. I know exactly what your referencing which is a twelve year old feral child and her sister walking around with dangerous weapons, intimidating people and then when anyone stands up to her, they turn the camera on and cry foul. When I was a kid I used to hang out with kids from social, so I've seen it all before. Maybe its new to you, so you fall for it. Perhaps you believe that "clean shirt" is the height of wit?
> Especially since he's not causing those issues, he's just reading the room and calling it out as it is.
Good job in being part of the latest generation to fall for the oldest trick in the book. It's called a hate plank and its a cheap trick used by cheap politicians to manipulate cheap electors. Idk how you stumbled onto here but if it wasn't accidental then you really should know better because you've likely had some level of education, formal or self-taught. CPUs tell us how stupid we are when we give them instructions, have you not learned to distrust your own assumptions yet? How are you convinced that the biggest problems in a given nation are a consequence of the smallest group of people who have been here for the least amount of time?
> I feel like you're getting worked up for the wrong things.
I think getting upset at people playing victim and painting the world as ending in order to obtain political power IS the thing to get worked up about. Personally I love how the slogan MAGA embeds itself in the lie that America isn't great already. Certainly by the size definiton its pretty great and has been for well over a hundred years. GDP per capita is off the fucking charts. Richest country in the world, by a significant margin, greatest stock growth in the world, attracts the most investment, with some of the cheapest goods, some of the best tech and greatest opportunities for its people. But it then convinces itself that *its* the victim. Its absolutely pathetic.
At least feral kids _are_ disadvantaged in the first place which is why they're like that.
This is like saying Steve Jobs didn't have much ability in making Apple devices so small you could fit them between your buttcheeks.
Compared to anyone else in the entire world: Elon Musk has the most agency in cultivating what people see on twitter because he owns it.
That your statement is so far divorced from reality as is possible, makes me think you are not taking this conversation seriously.